Abstract—This paper presents scented widgets, graphical user interface controls enhanced with embedded visualizations that facilitate navigation in information spaces. We describe design guidelines for adding visual cues to common user interface widgets such as radio buttons, sliders, and combo boxes and contribute a general software framework for applying scented widgets within applications with minimal modifications to existing source code. We provide a number of example applications and describe a controlled experiment which finds that users exploring unfamiliar data make up to twice as many unique discoveries using widgets imbued with social navigation data. However, these differences equalize as familiarity with the data increases. Index Terms—Information visualization, user interface toolkits, information foraging, social navigation, social data analysis. 1

Many systems provide the user with a limited viewport of a larger graphical workspace. In these systems, the user often needs to find and select targets that are in the workspace, but not visible in the current view. Standard methods for navigating to the off-screen targets include scrolling, panning, and zooming; however, these are laborious when users cannot see a target’s direction or distance. Techniques such as halos can provide awareness of targets, but actually getting to the target is still slow with standard navigation. To improve off-screen target selection, we developed a new technique called hop, which combines halos with a teleportation mechanism that shows proxies of distant objects. Hop provides both awareness of off-screen targets and fast navigation to the target context. A study showed that users are significantly faster at selecting off-screen targets with hopping than with two-level zooming or graband-drag panning, and it is clear that hop will be faster than either halos or proxy-based techniques (like drag-and-pop or vacuum filtering) by themselves. Hop both improves on halo-based navigation and extends the value of proxies to small-screen environments. Author Keywords Navigation, graphical workspaces, off-screen targets, halo,

Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME06), Paris, France We demonstrate that mobile phones can be used as an actively oriented handheld musical performance device. To achieve this we use a visual tracking system of a camera phone. Motion in the plane, relative to movable targets, rotation and distance to the plane can be used to drive MIDI enabled sound generation software or hardware. Mobile camera phones are widely available technology and we hope to find ways to make them into viable and widely used performance devices. 1.

Information navigation techniques for handheld devices support interacting with large virtual spaces on small displays, for example finding targets on a large-scale map. Since only a small part of the virtual space can be shown on the screen at once, typical interfaces allow for scrolling and panning to reach off-screen content. Spatially aware handheld displays sense their position and orientation in physical space in order to provide a corresponding view in virtual space. We implemented various one-handed navigation techniques for camera-tracked spatially aware displays. The techniques are compared in a series of abstract selection tasks that require the investigation of different levels of detail. The tasks are relevant for interfaces that enable navigating large scale maps and finding contextual information on them. The results show that halo is significantly faster than other techniques. In complex situations zoom and halo show comparable performance. Surprisingly, the combination of halo and zooming is detrimental to user performance.

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Digital pen systems, originally designed to digitize annotations made on physical paper, are evolving to permit a wider variety of applications. Although the type and quality of pen feedback (e.g., haptic, audio, and visual) have a huge impact on advancing the digital pen technology, dynamic visual feedback has yet to be fully investigated. In parallel, miniature projectors are an emerging technology with the potential to enhance visual feedback for small mobile computing devices. In this paper we present the PenLight system, which is a testbed to explore the interaction design space and its accompanying interaction techniques in a digital pen embedded with a spatially-aware miniature projector. Using our prototype, that simulates a miniature projection (via a standard video projector), we visually augment paper documents, giving the user immediate access to additional information and computational tools. We also show how virtual ink can be managed in single and multi-user environments to aid collaboration and data management. User evaluation with professional architects indicated promise of our proposed techniques and their potential utility in the paper-intensive domain of architecture.

Multi-point interaction tasks involve the manipulation of several mutually-dependent control points in a visual workspace – for example, adjusting a selection rectangle in a drawing application. Multi-point interactions place conflicting requirements on the interface: the system must display objects at sufficient scale for detailed manipulation, but it must also provide an efficient means of navigating from one control point to another. Current interfaces lack any explicit support for tasks that combine these two requirements, forcing users to carry out sequences of zoom and pan actions. In this paper, we describe three novel mechanisms for view control that explicitly support multipoint interactions with a single mouse, and preserve both visibility and scale for multiple regions of interest. We carried out a study to compare two of the designs against standard zoom and pan techniques, and found that task completion time was significantly reduced with the new approaches. The study shows the potential of interfaces that combine support for both scale and navigation.

When camera phones are used as magic lenses in handheld augmented reality applications involving wall maps or posters, pointing can be divided into two phases: (1) an initial coarse physical pointing phase, in which the target can be directly observed on the background surface, and (2) a fine-control virtual pointing phase, in which the target can only be observed through the device display. In two studies, we show that performance cannot be adequately modeled with standard Fitts’ law, but can be adequately modeled with a two-component modification. We chart the performance space and analyze users’ target acquisition strategies in varying conditions. Moreover, we show that the standard Fitts’ law model does hold for dynamic peephole pointing where there is no guiding background surface and hence the physical pointing component of the extended model is not needed. Finally, implications for the design of magic lens interfaces are considered.

An increasing number of users are adopting large, multimonitor displays. The resulting setups cover such a broad viewing angle that users can no longer simultaneously perceive all parts of the screen. Changes outside the user’s visual field often go unnoticed. As a result, users sometimes have trouble locating the active window, for example after switching focus. This paper surveys graphical cues designed to direct visual attention and adapts them to window switching. Visual cues include five types of frames and mask around the target window and four trails leading to the window. We report the results of two user studies. The first evaluates each cue in isolation. The second evaluates hybrid techniques created by combining the most successful candidates from the first study. The best cues were visually sparse – combinations of curved frames which use color to pop-out and tapered trails with predictable origin. Author Keywords Large displays, attention, window switching, user study.

MouseLight is a spatially-aware standalone mobile projector with the form factor of a mouse that can be used in combination with digital pens on paper. By interacting with the projector and the pen bimanually, users can visualize and modify the virtually augmented contents on top of the paper, and seamlessly transition between virtual and physical information. We present a high fidelity hardware prototype of the system and demonstrate a set of novel interactions specifically tailored to the unique properties of MouseLight. MouseLight differentiates itself from related systems such as PenLight in two aspects. First, MouseLight presents a rich set of bimanual interactions inspired by the ToolGlass interaction metaphor, but applied to physical paper. Secondly, our system explores novel displaced interactions, that take advantage of the independent input and output that is spatially aware of the underneath paper. These properties enable users to issue remote commands such as copy and paste or search. We also report on a preliminary evaluation of the system, which produced encouraging observations and feedback.